


Oh how he love's us

by orphan_account



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Arkham Asylum, F/F, M/M, POV Outsider, Therapy, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 13:27:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21137438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “I dreamed about him again.” was the first thing he said to her.or: Whether or not Dr. Lealand knows it, she's the physicists that understands Joker the best.





	Oh how he love's us

**Author's Note:**

> Title for random Christian rock song my bus driver was playing while driving us to school.  
May write a sequel to this but who knows ;)

“I dreamed about him again.” was the first thing he said to her.

Dr. Lealand sat down in her chair in front of patient 0801 cell, His face was pressed up against the glass. He's standing lazily, his hair covered his face like a green funeral vail. This was the version of patient 0801 that only she got to see. She just wasn't aware of it.

“of who, Batman?” Dr. Lealand asked. She mindlessly twirled the pencil in her hand. She hadn't written anything down on her clipboard yet. Usually she used a pen to take her session note’s, but with patient 0801 there seemed to always seemed the need to erased

“yes Batman! Who else would it be Santa claus?!” the patient snapped back.

Dr. Leland stomach curled in on itself. Such was the case whenever patient 0801 raised his voice, reminding her that he was still a renowned murderer. But she was one of the oldest physicists in arkham, and is deeply respected because of it. so she knew how to not flink, She was very good at pretending not to be afraid.

“well if you are comfortable enough I would gladly listen.”

The guard standing down the hall gave Dr. Lealand a pointed look. Dr. Lealand gave her a subtitle little shake of her head back. Witch she hope communicated ‘I've been here for so long that I know for a fact that if he wanted to kill me he would have.’

“well yeah, I wouldn't have brought it up if I wasn't going to talk about it.” The patient rolled his eyes “And of course your willing to hear all about it, Your the srink!”

Dr. Lealand nodded her head, not really paying attention to his quips at the moment. On her paper she scribbled down notes in her impeccable cursive handwriting.

_Patient is reporting to have repetitive dreams, along with more notable mood swings. May need to raise sleep medications._

“Hey Doc what'd ya writing there?” he asked after a moment, he asked her this every time.

“hmm this? Oh nothing just notes, please go on.”

The patients made a clicking sound with his tongue, then sighed. Dr. Lealand looked up from her clipboard, and saw that the patient was now sitting on the floor. (He used to have a chair in his room, Until he used it to bash another guards head in.)

“Well... It starts with me in a funhouse ...I'm walking down the hall of mirrors, and there are mirrors everywhere. But when I look into the mirrors, in them I see him: the Bat... I try to find him, I kept screaming and banging on the mirrors trying to catch up with him. But I never do…”

Dr. Lealand involuntarily imagined patient 8081 screaming at the foggy reflections of the Batman until his mouth was dry and his throat horse. Until he can't even laugh in that strange way he does.

“So Doc, whatcha think it means?” he asked after a moment.

Dr. Lealand didn't think dreams mean anything. There's too much nonsensical white noise in our heads for dreams to be anything but a way are brains entertain ourselves while we rest and recharge. But something about patient 8081 plain, almost casual description of his dream sent a shiver down her shoulder blades.

“I think it shows your emotional connection to Batman”  
was the most vague response she can come up with, without using words like ‘codependency’ and ‘obsession.’

“hmm...I suppose…” the patient started to hum a sad little tune.

“you miss him, don't you?”  
Over the past few weeks Batman has been off planet with the Justice League, doing god knows what.

Don't get her wrong, she is not anti-League she was very grateful that they were out of world, To maybe save them from an alien invasion, or to put a stop to a tyrannical leaders evil ways, or to prevent an impending war between ancient civilization. Or maybe three combined.

It's just that when Batman was gone everything always got so much worse. Crime always rises. And not just because gotham police where incompetent (although that certainty didn't help.) But the big time villains always chewed their way through the city, even the various Robins and Batgirls could only help so much,Every big villain; all except the Joker.

Dr. Lealand once wrote down in her notes:

_Whenever Batman is gone for an extended amount of time, Joker will usually become more violent and antisocial, even going as far as to self-harm._

Once Batman took a break for a year and a half. (The longest break he's ever had.) a few months in, Joker put himself in a coma. It Arkhams first ever recorded self-induced coma. After all this Time, Dr. Lealand is still not entirely sure how he did it, the arkham staff just found him brain dead and drooling on himself. It's honestly a miracle no one poisoned him.  
Although Dr. Lealand had to admit to herself, as horrible as he is, it was quite boring without him.

“oh I always miss him… so much.” he answered, twisting his hands into shadow puppets. “I mean, why does he think he can just up and leave me to hang out with his friends all out of the blue like that?! It like he's doing it on purpose just to rile me up! Do you think I not fulfilling him?”

His eye's where more alive then they've been all of the the two weeks that he's been in Arkham. He unfurled his fists out of the t-rex shape it was in, then grabbed on to his green curls and started to pull. Not hard enough to rip any of his hair out, just to make his scalp hurt.

“Am I the reason he's gone away!? I bet he thinks I'm too old and tired to keep up with the game! Well if he thinks he can just push me aside like some rusty toys he's got another thing coming!”

Patient 1080 stood up with an overwhelming amount of dignity for someone in wearing orange scrubs in a mental ward.  
He started sways back and forth, and pacing his room like a paranoid, drunken sailor.

It reminded Dr. Lealand of a fish in the fish tank at the Bar & Buffet Restaurant she and her wife went to last week. The fish tank was right next to the table where you got your plates, and utensils for the buffet. In the tank there was a single goldfish, although it was hardly gold, it was pail, flaky, and some of its fins were ripped and frailed, like an old pair of jeans. It just swam back and forth in its bare tank, as fish do.

“Hey Joan, does that fish look like it's planing something our what?” her wife joked, scooping mashed potatoes on to her plate.  
Joan Lealand hadn't laughed, because all she could think about was her patients, pacing in their cells.

“I'm sure Batman misses Gotham- and you, very much.”  
She was not sure Batman missed patient 8081 all that much, she wouldn't blame him. But she was pretty sure he missed Gotham, (or at least she hoped so.) So it was only really half a lie.  
Patient 8081 peered at her with big green eyes, she could almost count his blonde eye lashes. She looked just as glazed over as bullet proof glass separating them.

“Do you truly think so?” his voice was more scratchy and disoriented then it usually was.

“positive,” half-positive. Dr. Lealand did not like telling a lie. She was a physicist, she told patients what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear.But this was only a half lie, half lies she could do.

“Besides, some time apart would probably be good for you two.”  
She mused aloud.  
“What do you mean?”  
_She freezes, what do you means?_ were bad, _what do you means?_ where patient 8081 tell phrase.  
“I just meant that...sometimes...time apart can help a relationship. “absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and all that.”  
Dr. Lealand suddenly hated the sound of her own voice.

“why does are relationship need help?”  
His voice had risen to a hysterical high note. Through the terror, her mind thought about whether or not he ever hates his voice, or does his narcissism stop him from noticing it.

_Patient 8081 has only expressed doubt or has self-deprecating comments whenever his and the Batman's ‘relationship’ is in question. He's not ‘playing the game, or not ‘challenging’ him enough etc. He seems to believe that Batman and him have a deeper bond than that of a vigilante and criminal._

She had written that the session before the patient had himself put in a coma. She doesn't quit remember the rest, hopefully she will have the time to look over them again.

“I...I’m just saying...sometimes when couples spend so much time together, they tend to want to spend some time apart...you know...keep the love new and...fresh.”

“So what, Batman's bored of me and that's why he's gone?!”

“What? no! Batman is on a Justice League mission! You know this! It was on the news just a few days ago!”

She shouldn't have raised her voice, why did she raise her voice? Patient 8081 always did have a way of bringing out unprofessional emotions in arkham staff. ‘That doesn't excuse it’, she would scolded herself later.

“ And that's proves that he prefers to spend time with his dame team then with me!”

“No, no it doesn't…”  
She said, a little more of a hushed voice the before.  
“Yes. Yes it does!” Patient 8081 yelped in response. Stomping on the cell floor.  
Dr. Lealand was all to aware that she sounded like a little kid arguing, she wanted intended to say something else, something smart. But she just couldn't find the right words.

“Do you…do you ever think that this, this obsession with Batman you have, just makes you feel worse? I mean you can be so much more happier if you let these things go!”  
Dr. Lealand felt like a river dame, that patient 8081 put a crack in, and now there was a Flood.  
“Just look at yourself! Pacing in a cell making yourself sick with jealousy over nothing! And what exactly do you achieve? Nothing! All you just make yourself feel awful. Getting absolutely nothing accomplished!”

She waved her hands in front of her face, trying to explain her points with her body as well as her words.

  
Patient 8081 stopped and stared in disbelief He began opening and closing mouth, like couldn't decide what to say next.

“That fish is diseased,” she replied back to her wife, two drinks at the bar and buffett. “you can tell because of its pale and flaky complexion.”  
“They probably don't feed it enough…” her wife responded, four drinks in and gorging herself on hot wings.

The patient's hair was in his face again, she couldn't even see his eyes anymore; it was like a bundle of moss eating his face.

“How...dare you…” his voice sounds like an arrow flying through a stiff wind.  
“ How dare you call me obsessed! You're the one who are obsessed! You're always asking me a bunch of questions, always trying to get into my head! But you never ever do! Because I never let you in!”

The patient was pacing again, tugging fist fulls of his hair, the green strands swirls and falls to the ground.

“You don't deserve the mad genius of my mind! Just like none of you deserve Batman, this city doesn't deserve him! Your all so, so- unworthy! None of you, not a single one of you loves him as much as me! I practically worship him!”

Patient 8081 began to kick at the walls. The blunt thud of his kicks punctuated his words in the most violent, dramatic way possible.  
Dr. Leland has seen something like this before. ‘a tantrum,’ her brain supplied. ‘My god, he's throwing another tantrum.’

“Stop it Mr. Joker, your making a scene!”

The guard standing down the hall was giving her an intense look.

“none of you matter! None of are worthy of the Batman love like I am! And yet he just up and leaves me! How can that be? I'm his nemesis, there should be nothing that comes between us! He has to know that! He has to...has...to…”

He's rant stops as quickly as it began. He stands still Like a puppet with its strings cut. Or perhaps like Medusa turning her victims to a stone statue. Or maybe like pausing the T.V mid program.

Then, one, two, three, big fat tears dribbled down his pale cheeks and chin.

“He... has to- has to know…how much I... love him.”

Dr. Lealand almost gasped aloud. This was the most emotional, the most vulnerable, the most human, she has ever seen patient 8081.

she wants to say something, needed to say something  
But it was like her mouth was stuffed with dusty mothballs.  
In the distance she could hear the thud - thud- thuding of walking boots approaching.

Dr. Lealand parted her lips, and gulped down a breath of fresh air. Her lips suddenly felt so chapped, and her tongue was like lead. She could feel the words to calm the patient down form in her mind. But nothing came out.  
She felt a heavy hand being placed upon her shoulder. The hand gripped her shoulder as if she was a balloon about to float up and away.

“OK session over, time to go.”

It was the guard that escorted her. What was her name penny? Jennie?... Josie! It's was Josie Gladstone.

Josie started to talk into her mandatory radio in hand she was still griping the Doctors shoulder. Dr. Lealand also had a walki-talkie, although she hardly used it.

“we got a situation at sell 8081, patient may need to sedated.”

She didn't think guards can authorized a medication dosage. But this was arkham, anything goes.  
Patient 1808 was still standing in his cell, crying. Josie looked confused, how much of their session did she overhear?

Dr. Lealand never usually calls her patients by there cell number, but it was that of call him the motherfucking Joker.  
She got up and dusted of her lab coat.

“I have to go, we'll talk about this episode of yours next Tuesday alright?”

‘That is if you don't escape.’ She mentally added to herself as she walked down the hall a little behind josie.

‘or kill me.’ She thought later on her lunch break while while texting her wife.


End file.
